Vendorbus – Refinement

Vendorbus is well underway now with the first sprint being achieved. All the documentation has been done and iterated upon and we are now reaching the end of the second sprint which for my part is finishing all my environment assets. It certainly wasn’t a quick process but I’ll try to make this post fairly quick by detailing the back and forth process that led to my asset creation.

A part of the games level is a set of ‘feature’ buildings that stand out from the rest and the biggest one of these is the Hospital. For a few hours I crunched away modelling the mesh which was far more then I expected considering the voxel nature of the meshes. The reason for this is the MagicaVoxel engine has grid limitations of 126x126x126 pixels which makes applying details and artifacts to a mesh very difficult. But nevertheless I made a Hospital and posted it to the teams Slack communications for feedback. And to my dismay, it was wrong. Due to the scaling requirements which I had overlooked at this point in time my mesh wasn’t suitable, effectively scrapping the last few hours I spent on it. After a brief discussion with the team, I decided it would be best to reduce all the structural assets in the game to modular bite sized pieces. This meant that the level designer could really go wild creating a wide variety of buildings as if he was playing with lego, but would also add a lot more time to my schedule as my asset list grew exponentially.

So after collaborating with the game students I found a problem with what was to be an iconic structure of the level but also figured out a way to create a wide array of assets with a handful of meshes. I’m just glad the Hospital was the first asset I decided to do otherwise it would have been heartbreaking redoing a few days worth of work.